Family Talk

Dr. James Dobson: Welcome everyone to Family Talk. It's a ministry of the James Dobson Family Institute, supported by listeners just like you. I'm Dr. James Dobson, and I'm thrilled that you've joined us.

Roger Marsh: Welcome to Family Talk, the broadcast division of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. I'm Roger Marsh. Today, we are bringing you one of Dr. James Dobson's favorite conversations, featuring NFL Hall of Fame coach Joe Gibbs.

You likely know Coach Gibbs as a three-time Super Bowl champion with the Washington Redskins in the 1980s and the 1990s. He was also the owner of a NASCAR racing team that tasted victory at the Daytona 500. By any measure the world uses, Joe Gibbs is a picture of success.

But that's not the whole story. Coach Gibbs sat down with Dr. Dobson to talk honestly about the ups and downs of his life, including the mistakes and heartache that came before the trophies. He shares why family must always come before career and how God remained his one constant through it all. Let's join Dr. James Dobson and his guest, Coach Joe Gibbs, right now on today's edition of Family Talk.

Dr. James Dobson: Can I call you coach? Is that all right?

Joe Gibbs: Please. I tell everybody once you've been a coach, you've been called everything. Believe me. So coach is great. My grandbabies call me coach. I get a kick out of it.

Dr. James Dobson: You've done many successful things, but none more than being an assistant coach at USC for the Trojans. I can remember that under coach John McKay, right?

Joe Gibbs: You're a Trojan, absolutely. Those were great years. I have so many stories from there. That was a dream of mine because I actually grew up in the Whittier and Norwalk area. I wasn't good enough to go to SC, so I went to junior college. It was always a dream of mine to go back and coach there, and I got a chance to do that.

Dr. James Dobson: It was always a dream of mine that after you left the NFL, you would come back to USC and take one of those open coaching positions. But I'm giving up on it. I don't think we're going to make it.

Joe Gibbs: I think our last couple of offers Pat looked at me and said, "Read my lips: no. You can go; I'm staying here with the grandbabies." So we're not going to do that one.

Dr. James Dobson: It is so good to have you here. After being so successful in coaching and then going into the NASCAR racing experience, one would get the idea that success has just followed you all the days of your life. That really hasn't been true, has it?

Joe Gibbs: No, it hasn't been true. As a matter of fact, I tell people that if they read this book, I can save them ten years of misery because what's in this book is all mistakes. I think it's kind of funny because if you wind up winning Super Bowls, a lot of the struggles on how you get there and a lot of the heartache that we go through in life gets lost. Eventually, you win a Super Bowl and then the same thing with the Winston Cup. But Pat and I have had our struggles along the way, and that's what's documented in the book.

Dr. James Dobson: Why did you leave football?

Joe Gibbs: I left football because I loved it. It was one of the greatest jobs in the world. It took me about four long months of heart searching, and Pat and I going away as a family and really thinking about it. That's all we had done as a family. When you coach, the whole family coaches. Pat ran everything at home. She took care of the boys, and I really coached. The boys would come to camp and everything.

I really left because both boys had gone off to college, and I thought they would always be with me. They left, and I went to football, and all of a sudden, I became a football recluse. I'd missed JD playing most of his football career. I always wanted to see him play, and I did get to see him play a few times using helicopters and things.

Coy was playing at Stanford, and I said, "At this point in my life, it's really family. I think it's time for me to step out and go see him." Which I did. I went to see him play every game at Stanford for the next two years. It was really for family reasons. I think it was right. I was scared to death to do it. Once I stepped out, it was almost like God just gave me peace.

Dr. James Dobson: How hard was it to walk away from the glamour, the excitement, the adrenaline, the money, and the fame? How difficult was that?

Joe Gibbs: It was very difficult. As a profession, you grow up in it and you actually live it. It monopolizes a lot of your life. If you'd asked me Monday evening at ten o'clock during the football season what I was doing, I could have told you. That's how structured my life was. But I really think it's one of the greatest jobs in the world. I loved it, but I really felt like it was time for me to probably do something else. Thirty years of almost anything's enough.

Dr. James Dobson: Joe, how did your relationship with Pat survive the all-encompassing experience of coaching in the NFL?

Joe Gibbs: I really think that Pat's a special person. One of the things I never recommend for a coach is that if they've been married for a while, they shouldn't just go into coaching. It's almost like you have to grow up in it. For six months out of the year, I slept at the office three nights a week. She ran the whole show. I got to see the boys on Friday night. It takes a special woman to do that.

Dr. James Dobson: Did she complain about it?

Joe Gibbs: No, it was her life, and she kind of handled it. As a matter of fact, when I came home, after about three days, she would say, "Shut up and get out of here." She was used to running the show. Truly, it was a partnership. Now, there were a lot of advantages to coaching too. The boys got to come to camp, and we got the great thrill of victory. Pat got to enjoy some things too. But truly, Pat is an unusual person, as I think most coaches' wives are.

She had her struggles too. She had a very serious surgery in 1980. I came home, and Pat shared with me that night that the doctor said she had an acoustic neuroma, which is a serious brain tumor. When we came out of that surgery, she had paralysis on one side of her face. As I shared in both books, it's been one of the toughest things we've ever had to deal with. She encourages me so much because she's so strong. She always said to me, "Look, I know that the Lord has promised me in the end that everything is going to work out the best for me."

Dr. James Dobson: That's the key to your life, Joe. You really are serious about your love for the Lord.

Joe Gibbs: I am. I think the reason for the second book is that I had a spiritual father once who made a great statement. I told him I might write a book, and he said, "Do you have anything to say?" What prompted me on this second one was the fact that so many people walk up to me because of the way the world sees things now. They walk up to me because I've won Super Bowls and Winston Cup championships. They don't really know a lot about my background, but they will say to me, "Joe, how do I become successful?"

When they say that, I know what they're meaning. They look at me and they say, "How do I make money and I become president of the company or win football games?" That's what I was interested in when I came out of school. I was interested in those two things because the world told me if I get enough of that money and enough football games, I'm going to be happy.

Halfway through the first few years there, I said, "Wait a second. If I don't have somebody to enjoy this and go through it with me, life's going to be a disaster." So I added relationships to it.

Dr. James Dobson: That is the bottom line for this program because it's a message that absolutely must be heard. You are a man's man, and you fell into a man's trap. How many men do we know who have become obsessed with work and so driven to accomplish those things you just talked about that they lose sight of everything else that's important? They lose their relationship with the Lord and their families. They wake up in their 40s or 50s, and by then, it's too late.

Joe Gibbs: It's a natural trap. The world says, "This will make you happy." We charge out through life and go ten, twenty, thirty, or forty years, and all of a sudden, we look back and say, "Oh my gosh." As I accomplished these things, I realized that's not the most important thing in my life. Really, what's the most important thing Pat and I are going to leave on this earth? It's going to be our kids, our grandkids, and the influence we're having on others.

Dr. James Dobson: I thank God that you learned that. I had the same temperament that you have. I'm a type A, go-for-it person. I got pretty excited about life when I was young, and there were opportunities out there for me that I never would have anticipated. When I got out of graduate school and wrote "Dare to Discipline," everything came at me.

Shirley was a little less tolerant of that than Pat. Shirley, in a very loving way, just said to me, "That's not going to work. You're making a big mistake." She helped pull me back. I probably would have made an enormous mistake in our family and our life if it hadn't been for her and for my father. Also, because of my love for the Lord, I began to see things in Scripture, and He began talking to me. It is a trap. It looks so right. In my case, I had the excuse of doing it for the Lord's work. I had it all rationalized.

Joe Gibbs: I sat across the table from a self-made billionaire that owned the Washington Redskins, Jack Kent Cooke. The only time I ever saw tears in his eyes was when he said to me, "Joe, I've messed up." What he was referring to was relationships. He'd had four marriages and a lot of broken relationships. Here was a guy that had done what the world said: made all the money, was a billionaire, and had climbed the ladder to success. Yet I'll always remember that about Mr. Cooke in that meeting we had.

Dr. James Dobson: J. Paul Getty, at one time the richest man in the world, said he'd made a mess out of his life. Even though he made all that money, he couldn't figure out how to make it with a family. The word "excess" really describes you. If people look at you, they would think the word "success" would be the defining word, but you say excess was the defining word.

Joe Gibbs: Yes, it was. I was so driven. I definitely wanted to be successful, and I fell into the plan. Mine was strictly through hard knocks, and that's what's in this book. In almost all these areas, I made serious mistakes. Thank God that there was a loving God there. I had a little spiritual father and rededicated my life in 1972.

Then what started happening in my life was I started discovering through God's Word that He really is our head coach. You and I are playing the game of life, the biggest game of all. He's our head coach, and He left a game plan here. I was playing the game without studying the game plan. I was a fool. I jumped off into finances and thought I could do it myself.

Dr. James Dobson: You almost had to declare bankruptcy.

Joe Gibbs: I was technically bankrupt. It was the biggest mess in the world. I sat with two attorneys and two accountants one day, and we spent six hours and couldn't add up everything this partnership was in. I was the only guy that was left; everybody else filed bankruptcy and left.

It was a real estate investment. It shows you how smart I am; I said you can't lose in real estate. But if I'd only followed one principle in God's book, I would have been okay. God speaks over 2,300 times about finances. He knew money was going to be important.

Dr. James Dobson: He talked more about money than He did about heaven.

Joe Gibbs: In God's Word, it says never co-sign a loan unless you're willing to pay it all off. If I'd just followed one principle, I could have saved myself so much heartache. But I think I needed to go through that. The great thing about belonging to the Lord was that after that experience was over, Pat and I at one point took everything we had and gave it to a bank. They paid our bills, and we got a per diem to live on. That's how bad it was.

When we got out of that four and a half years later, I sat down and wrote fifteen things that I learned through that experience. Number one on that list was: listen to your wife. I found a way to kind of make her do it. She didn't really want to. Those are the times I've gotten the biggest messes in my life, when I don't listen to godly counsel or I don't listen to my mate.

Dr. James Dobson: But NASCAR is doing fine for you.

Joe Gibbs: NASCAR is why God was putting me through those things. Now we have a successful business. I'm so paranoid now. I have so many people that look over it. I know I'm not a good businessman. So I have so many people looking at it that you'd probably recognize some of the people I have come in as consultants. We meet once a month. JD's a much better businessman than I am. He kind of oversees everything. It's a big business now. We're racing cars all across America. It's a big deal for us.

Dr. James Dobson: Have you learned to control the pressures and to not continue the tendency to overwork yourself?

Joe Gibbs: I'm much better now about that. Football is a unique life. You drive yourself. I was the technical person; people were waiting on me. When you're in that role, there's always eleven people, and everybody's counting on you. The position I'm in now is more of a businessman helping to pick the people. Yes, I work with people problems, but I'm not the technical person.

The guys today in this sport, the crew chiefs, are just the same as coaches. They go on Thursday and come back on Sunday. They have their guys that go with them, and they technically make the car run. Those are the guys that have the pressure in this. Paying the bills is a pressure, but I have a different pressure now.

Dr. James Dobson: Joe, let's address the guy out there who's making the same mistakes that you and I were inclined to make. There are a lot of them. There are a lot of women listening to us today who are saying, "If only my husband knew this, if only he would listen." Maybe they'll listen to the former coach of a Super Bowl champion. Give your best shot.

Joe Gibbs: My best shot would be this. To me, most of life is common sense. To me, I think I can prove to almost anyone that God exists. If I look at a watch, I could tell anybody out there that there's a watchmaker. It's just common sense. Now look at the world and the way this world is crafted. At nine years old, I'm kind of looking around. In school, I'm being told that two amoebas happened to hit in a muddy puddle of water two billion years ago and I was an accident. I didn't like the sound of that.

Then in church, my grandmother and mother had me in church. The pastor there was telling me something totally different. He said there was a God who loved me, made me, crafted me, and knit me together in my mother's womb. He made me special. I got up and went forward in church and said, "That makes more sense to me."

I would say to any man or woman out there, if you just think about the world and the way this is put together, there has to be a world maker. Once I made that commitment to Him and asked Him to come into my life, then the mistakes I made were still veering off and chasing my own desires. When I discovered that the Bible is the game plan God left here for our game of life, it changed everything.

Many people out there are struggling. I don't want to know what they think; I want to know what God thinks. If we're going to live life and God put us here, He covers it all. He covers every aspect and everything we need to know. If you want to know something about relationships, he tells you. It's all there.

I would say to any person out there, look, I've built a business and I've been involved in things most people wouldn't argue with me on. If you're a team builder out there, if you're a man and you're trying to build a business team, you need to be studying God's Word. Jesus Christ had three years to change the world. Was He good at picking people? He picked twelve guys that nobody would have picked. There wasn't one of them a star. He took them, and the way He talked and communicated is all in here. If I'm a businessman, I need to be studying this Word.

Dr. James Dobson: Let me add my best shot to what you just said. I want to speak particularly to the guy out there who's a Christian but he's kind of nominal. He goes to church, but he hasn't really taken it seriously or made the commitment.

The best reason I can give him is what hit me when my daughter was born. If I don't do my job in terms of introducing my kids to Jesus Christ, if I miss it there, I'll never see them again after I die. This is the end of it. Maybe I'll make it to heaven, but will they? For me, that is the greatest motivation in life. This life is merely a preparation for the next. If you get that priority right, nothing else comes close. Everything else is just marking time.

Joe Gibbs: If we're going to be playing this game, we're going to play it forever. One night I was up talking to Coy and I was sharing with him a couple of things like I do when he goes to bed. I was talking about heaven, and musicians and harps and all this stuff. Of course, here's a kid racing bikes and all these kinds of things. He looks up and he goes, "Dad, I don't think I'm gonna like heaven."

I said, "Coy, why would you say that?" He goes, "Playing a harp?" I said, "Let me tell you something, Coy. We're going to have to leave this up to God because if it's playing a harp, I'm not sure I'm going to be excited about it either. You know what I think heaven's going to be? God made us this way. He made us competitive, right? I think it'll be some thousand-year football games. It's going to be some thousand-year races. And if not, He's going to work a miracle in us."

Dr. James Dobson: And I'm going to make the touchdowns this time, right? I may even be a star up there and get to carry the ball. We are made a little different than women, and that competitive edge is there. For some guys, it's a whole lot more than others. If our listeners are among those that are driven from within, be careful. That's dangerous. You can make the biggest mistake of your life. That's what you're trying to say in "Racing to Win," isn't it?

Joe Gibbs: All men have a desire to really do something great. I see great pastors and people that have great visions like yourself. But I think if we're not careful, that drive needs to be channeled. We need to know what the game plan is. As I said, I made a rededication in 1972. There may be some men out there that say, "Yeah, I believe in God, I have a personal relationship, but I'm just not on fire." We need to get in God's Word, serious prayer, Bible study, and get with a group of people in a church Bible study.

Dr. James Dobson: You're using your present responsibility in NASCAR to win people to the Lord inside that sport, aren't you?

Joe Gibbs: We have a dynamic chance for opportunity inside motor sports. Think about this: we're going to 36 cities all around the country, taking a lot of people that have real good testimonies. The people there come for three and four days, and they're ready to listen. We're doing some exciting things inside motor sports to reach out. We have Bible studies at race shops. We have a full-time chaplain at our race shop, Bob Dyer, and he works with all of our people. We have Bible studies each week and small group studies.

Dr. James Dobson: You led Dale Jarrett, one of your drivers, to the Lord, didn't you?

Joe Gibbs: Actually, what happened was Dale Jarrett and Jimmy Makar, our crew chief and driver—the famous driver Dale Jarrett—they came on board with us. It happened to be the year that we won the Super Bowl in Minnesota. They came to the Super Bowl chapel service. I'll always remember that in that service, when it came time to make commitments to Christ, they stood up and both Kelly and Patty stood up too. It was one of the greatest nights I think I've ever been part of.

Dr. James Dobson: Well, it is a pleasure to have you here. I've loved you and appreciated your friendship for all those years. Anytime you write a book, you come back. Will you?

Joe Gibbs: There are so many people praying for you all. I think you're helping to change the world, and I'm praying that in America we need a moral awakening. That's what I'm praying for.

Dr. James Dobson: That is the only thing that's going to save us. "Racing to Win" is the name of the book. The subtitle is "Establish Your Game Plan for Success." Not excess, but success. I recommend this book to our listeners. Now, you talked a lot in this book about going too fast and overworking. You're going to run out of here on a wing and a prayer literally today trying to get to where you're going.

Joe Gibbs: Today's probably not the best day for me to be talking about that. I got up at 3:30, and we're going to go all day and race cars this afternoon in Phoenix. It's amazing the way you can get around the world. But I've got my priorities, and we kind of enjoy things as we go now.

Dr. James Dobson: Blessings to you. Give a hug to Pat for me.

Joe Gibbs: Thanks, Jim. I will.

Roger Marsh: Success and excess, just one letter apart, but a world of difference in between them. Coach Joe Gibbs won championships on the field and on the racetrack, but his real legacy is coming home to his family and to the Lord. You've been listening to Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk as we featured a candid conversation Dr. Dobson had with Hall of Fame football coach Joe Gibbs.

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I'm Roger Marsh, and on behalf of all of us here at Family Talk and the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, thanks so much for spending some time with us today. Be sure to join us again next time right here for another edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk, the voice you trust for the family you love.